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Art of Tags

by Tim Crook, 2007
http://www.sprettynice.com

Examining the qualitative aspects of folksonomies. Using Del.icio.us in conjunction with Flickr to generate data on the makeup, use and distribution of tags. Finding a way to manipulate this data in the form of an interactive generative art piece.

Del.icio.us is used to generate a pool of tags for the search term, ordered according to frequency of occurrence and relevance. These tags are then used to search for related photos from Flickr. Due to the arbitrary nature of tags, and the way people develop their own folksonomies the photos returned will more often than not be seemingly un-related to the search term.

The generative art mixer gives you a chance to play with the results from Del.icio.us and Flickr, and visualise these results. The aim here is not to accurately re-create the information from the search, but abstract it to the point where it becomes a form of representation, with less emphasis and importance placed on the actual content itself and focussing on creating a more powerful visualisation.

The way that the user struggles with the generative art mixer to get what they want is similar in how one might struggle with poorly tagged data. The user has some level of control, yet where they are taken; the journey they experience is determined by the computer, and by the data pulled from delicious.

Example: You search for cow, Del.icio.us finds results relating to a funny video of a cow. So photos are pulled from Flickr which match the tags "funny", "video", "animal", "humour", and you get a photo of a bunny with a pancake on its head. Performing the same search a few days or even hours later can result in very different search results!

For more information on the development and progress of this project please visit: http://blog.birdsigh.com